Review: 'Biography of X,' by Catherine Lacey

When Catherine Lacey's latest novel begins, X, a famous artist, is already dead, but she is omnipresent on the page. The narrator of "Biography of X," journalist C.M. Lucca, is also X's widow, and her grief is exacerbated by how little she knows about her late wife. (Examples include X's place of birth, X's parents, and X's given name.)

X declined to cooperate with her would-be biographers during her lifetime, and in the wake of her death, C.M. assumes the role of oppositionist. "Her life will not become a historical object," C.M. insists. Shortly thereafter, in seeking the stories of X, she becomes a reluctant biographer.

Lacey complicates X's willful air of mystery by setting the work in a dystopian landscape. Although states and cities maintain their current names, the country that X and C.M. inhabit has an alternative history: "In 1945 … a wall had been erected between much of the Deep South and the rest of the country."

X, born in what is known as the Southern Territory, flees after an act of political rebellion, abandoning her first identity (Caroline Luanna Walker), a husband, Paul, and Zebulon, a son she never mentions to C.M. "The trouble with knowing people is how the target keeps moving," C.M. muses — an understatement in the case of this marriage. With each interview C.M. conducts or file she reads, she gains a deeper understanding of how little she knew.

The themes Lacey raises in this latest work are abundant: questions of story and truth, text and memory, art and its cultural significance, the consequence of celebrity. "X believed that making fiction was sacred," C.M. says.

Lacey's approach to the making of fiction, in this case, is to adopt the structure and trappings of nonfiction. There are photographs of X and her family, as well as numerous citations and document clippings. There are excerpts from letters, interviews and diaries.

Lacey invokes the names of real publications, places, and, occasionally, people, to create this convincing pastiche. She takes risks by including, for instance, dense exposition — the history of the Southern, Northern and Western Territories has a detached, dry, purely informational tone — but these are risks taken in the service of authenticity. The prose feels bold and exhilarated, figuring itself out as it moves forward, an act of raucous creativity.

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy's writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, Lenny Letter, Narrative, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. She is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Biography of X

By: Catherine Lacey.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 394 pages, $28.